Re: email as a bona fide git transport

Nicolas Belouin
2019-10-18T06:43:51Z

On 10/18/19 4:52 AM, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 09:54:47PM -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 06:30:29PM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
>>>> It could only possibly work if nobody ever adds their own
>>>> "Signed-Off-By" or
>>>> any other bylines. I expect this is a deal-breaker for most maintainers.
>>> Yeah it is :(
>>>
>>> But, if we could just have the signature on the code change, not the
>>> changelog text, that would help with that issue.
>> We totally should, and I even mused on how we would do that here:
>> https://public-inbox.org/git/20190910121324.GA6867@pure.paranoia.local/
>>
>> However, since git's PGP signatures are made for the content in the actual
>> commit record (tree hash, parent, author, commit message, etc), the only way
>> we could preserve them between the email and the git tree is if we never
>> modify any of that data. The SOB and other trailers would have to only be
>> applied to the merge commit, or migrate into commit notes.
> There's also the possibility to handle this a bit like we do when adding
> comments before the SOB: a PGP signature would apply to the text *before*
> it only. We could then have long chains of SOB, PGP, SOB, PGP etc.
>
> Willy

I don't think it can work that easily as the signed content is not just
the message.
It would need git to support nesting signatures and to allow amending a
commit without
touching the signature and to allow adding one to cover the new content
and to have a
way to verify every step.
Moreover you won't be able to reparent the commit as a maintainer (wich
I think is
also a deal-breaker)

Nicolas